Building things - from furniture, structures to houses - is great. Both as a professional or DIY enthusiast. But it is hard to actually start building. You need a design, you need a list of materials, a price estimation, technical drawings and instructions.

Of course, if you have the money just hire a professional designer or architect. But what if you have not? Besides, haven't people been building for millenia? What about all this existing knowledge that we can use?

The Archiyou Library aims to gather designs from all over the world to make them easily accessible on the web for people to start building them.

But no, it is not a website with a lot of dusty technical drawings. Instead, Archiyou brings design and making into the digital age. This means: parametric, open and collaborative.

Design is the art of fitting. Most designs are optimized for specific needs, local materials, fabrication methods, regulations or project location. If anything changes, you need to reevaluate the design and recreate all documentation. This is why design knowledge is so hard to reuse and thus expensive.

So at its core Archiyou is a way to codify design and its related outputs. Instead of drawing one specific shape it defines a variety of shapes using inputs called parameters. This is done with an open source scripting language we developed based on Javascript.

It’s a bit different from existing parametric design methods because the design and its related documentation exists entirely as code. Not only is it more effective and easier to define a design like this, it literally sets it free; Free from the desktop of the designer: Easy to view, edit online and be run anywhere. This is called Open Design.

So behind the Archiyou Library there is a new process of making and publishing designs. But most users will just see the results: flexible designs that you can fit to your needs, desires and practical constraints using a configurator. And then, with a push of the button: All the documentation to start building.

For the Archiyou Library we focus on designs that can be produced with basic materials, tools and skills. This enables the most people - from anywhere - to pick up materials and start making, learning and potentially starting a business.

Our products - from storage solutions to furniture, from construction components to green houses and small houses - are selected or designed by us based on quality, flexible usage, variety, ease and cost of making and sustainability. We prefer simple, apt and proven solutions over splashy high-design: Craft with a 21st century digital twist.

All designs can be highly customized which is extra rewarding to the maker and valuable to the end-user. Parameters also include the dimensions of raw materials - like wooden planks - which enables easy reuse of local material.

With Archiyou you too see the stool or garden bench in a pile of planks and have it too in the afternoon!

In a lot of ways Archiyou offers nothing new. Great designs remain so, but are now offered online: With more flexibility, automatic documentation and open source. Makers create beautiful things but maybe some new makers join because it's easier to begin with great proven designs, have fun making something more personal with local materials and potentially sell to clients too.

All these small changes brought by open codified design on Archiyou might add up to create something new. But we don’t exactly yet know what. But what we do know is that we can’t do it alone.

We want to work with designers to publish their designs on Archiyou and get recognized and valued for it. We want to engage with makers - from DIY enthusiasts to established professionals - to develop the most fun, efficient way to build beautiful things and run a business doing what you love.

In the future we might even offer bespoke, affordable and locally made products directly from designers and makers to consumers - and with it challenging the uniform wasteful centralized way of industrialized production.

But that dream is better made than written about for now. So let's start designing, building and publishing!